


the nature of uncarved blocks

by torches



Category: Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey)
Genre: Character of Color, Gen, Genderqueer, POV Second Person, Transfic Mini Fest, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-01
Updated: 2010-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-09 14:05:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torches/pseuds/torches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Of course you are. Who else would you be?", or: <i>The nature of uncarved blocks is how to describe what's hard to describe.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the nature of uncarved blocks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> Originally written for the prompt "Kino no Tabi, Kino(/Nimya), sartorial decisions" during the [Transfic Mini Fest](http://kanata.dreamwidth.org/1255196.html). Title and summary from "Shotgun" by Mansun, off the album _Six_. Same warnings as would apply to the series apply here: there are uncomfortable situations and no easy answers. Use your discretion.

When you clean a pistol, if you clean it properly (and anything worth doing is worth doing _properly_), you must take it apart. The first several times all the pieces are laid out before you it will look like a jumble of unfittable pieces, discordant and hostile to the joins of each other, and your (childish, weak, soft with baby fat) hands will fumble over the ridges in the metal. It is a struggle; there is no way this tangle of misbegotten parts belongs to a clean, _purposeful_ shape. But under your hands it becomes some _thing_ of meaning and utility.

When you are older and you have seen more of the world, you will learn many metaphors for this process. A radio signal cohering out of atmospheric noise, rare metal sifted from the floor of a river, clean water from a filtration machine (this last, in a letter sent by way of another traveler, from a woman you hadn't seen and been too busy to think of for quite some time; you pause with the parchment clutched in your gloves and the careful letters crinkle as you grin your way into a chuckle), the shaping of machinery called "cars" on an assembly line, all different names for the same act: calling forth something meaningful from seeming meaninglessness, from things the rest of the world would find unimportant, insignificant, unnecessary.

You were unnecessary once. It's an accident, nothing more, that people find you necessary now. Much like the pistol, you are no use without people to find you useful.

(You tell your teacher this one day, and she laughs, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes, and you think she sees something in your face that isn't supposed to be there. "You are not a pistol, little girl," she says, and you hate that term even when she uses it, so for many years you don't listen properly to what she tells you then, but in time you will learn to appreciate her wisdom. "A pistol has no eyes to see and no ears to hear what she wants to listen to. The pistol has no mind ready to accept the world she lives in and she cannot prepare herself for it." She turns to face you here, her eyes like marble worn down from years under cold waters, and her hand covers yours, squeezes once. "There are no secrets to good marksmanship. A pistol cannot _change_ itself - it's at the mercy of the world around it. Its owners, the weather, age ... a pistol has no power to fight these things, and without a hand to guide it, it has no power at all."

(You don't understand, and you tell her so - guns can misfire, can't they?

(She laughs; the smile doesn't reach her throat, and she tells you yes, but they must be mistreated first.

(Years later, you consider her words in a new light, cloaked in harsh sunlight with the bodies of dead men around you and your clothes still on your back. Your gun doesn't misfire then, but something feels jammed in a barrel and still waits to go off.)

On average, pistols require more care and maintenance than people (and motorrads, for that matter, but many travelers are prone to neglecting their companions for the sake of the journey; they do not stay travelers for long, they do not last as long as you have, as you will continue), but their concerns are more consistent and predictable. They cannot surprise themselves - they are born unsurprisable. This is how you are different from a pistol: your life is an unending surprise.

The first time you wear a dress, you tear its skirt to make a shirt of it instead, and (because you do not own any pants at that age, only one-piece pajamas) you run around the house half-naked like a dog looking for heels to bite, and when your mother catches you, you are punished for your rudeness to the seamstress, who made that dress for you out of the goodness of her heart and her dedication to her craft, and you are made to put on another which your mother does not let you tear to shreds. This is how you learn to feel guilty, and also to be disappointed, and that your body does not belong to you, but other people. (You are young enough that you barely understand your alphabet. You understand _this_.)

The last time you wear a dress begins the same day your father holds a knife in his hand, a stranger you met three days ago winds up between his hand and your chest, and you have made a new friend (the sound the knife makes as your father pulls it from the man's chest is muffled and solid. It meets resistance; the knife does not want to leave, but circumstances require that it must. You understand the knife's concerns instinctively) and ends days later, in the woods surrounded by wolves, with the sound of a gunshot.

You pass out on the way back to the old woman's camp, and when you wake she has fashioned a makeshift pair of pants and shirt from spare cloth; not the use she'd planned for it, she says, but your dress was _filthy_. As your eyes adjust to the flicker of the fire she tends, you can see your dress hanging on the side of a tent in the dark beyond. She follows the path of your eyes and tells you it'll be dry in the morning, barring rain, and then you can get out of those crappy old clothes she made for you. You are startled out of thoughts you no longer remember today by her kindness, but you smile and shake your head. These clothes fit as good as any others would. The dress isn't yours, after all. She laughs and - unexpectedly - accepts this without argument. The lack of judgment unmakes the quiet, passively smiling resolve you'd found yourself wearing in the presence of grownups so much smarter than yourself, and you don't stop babbling to her until it's grown dark and thick with night-time all around you, the cold creeping in around the dying edges of flame and humanity your savior keeps tended throughout. It's only then that she asks your name - and your voice catches in your throat, but as your hand brushes the edge of the rough, cottony stiffness of your new clothes, you remember the feel of the wind in your hair and Hermes' cool seat between your legs -

All the pieces of your life lie scattered at your feet. You reach out and pick one up, run your fingers across the shape of it. Experimentally, you pick up another one, still uncertain and clumsy with lack of practice, and fit the two pieces together.

Imagine your surprise when they slot together neatly, like they were never meant to be apart.

"Kino," you say, "my name is Kino. I want to be a traveler." Your words run together in youthful impatience. "I'm going to see _everything_."

She smiles. "First you need to survive," she says, and this is how she becomes your teacher.

The binding across your chest you acquire shortly after you leave her tutelage, as you're passing through a town painted in eye-searing reds, greens and yellows. You allow yourself to be led along in a parade of multi-hued (some with skin in natural tones of brown and others in clearly painted tones of blue, orange, red, pink, and yellow) revelers well past the street you see it on, prominently displayed in the window of some nondescript store, and circle back later in the day to find the store called Kaiman's Fetishery on the street of birds and fishes.

Kaiman is a deeply religious man; all his wares are for the purpose of ritual and he refuses to sell to anyone who intends to abuse his services for superficial or merely aesthetic reasons. You are not yet old and wise enough yourself to understand that there will be other opportunities, other places, you only understand that he is _here_, now, and you have to move on today if you intend to reach the next city before the dams surrounding this one are raised and the roads you need to cross are drowned by water. You stare at him for a long time, and you ask him what he would require as a show of faith strong enough to change his mind.

His faith and the faith of his city is not a faith of gods, and so he asks you to explain to him the color of your soul.

You kneel down next to Hermes and pat the motorrad's headlight, a smile on your face, and you tell him of the wind in your hair, the feel of the seat beneath your legs, the field of red flowers you found once and the slow, indifferent way they fell from the sky after you disturbed their places of rest, the itchiness of your first clothes, the sun on your skin, the pleasantness of Hermes' whining after a long day on the road and how easily it lulls you to sleep ("Ah! You really do that!" Hermes yelps indignantly, as if this isn't his way of making sure you _do_ sleep), the simple tragic dignity farmers confer upon their cows, the exactness of the sound of a raging river running through deep-forested woods when heard from under a tree hundreds of trees away, the look on a man's face as he was executed by firing squad for the crime of touching a child's genitals, the cry of a songbird early in the morning when no one but you was there to hear it; you tell him all these things and more until he cries out for you to stop, and having told of them, you silently promise never to tell of them again.

Kaiman thanks you for your respect and begs a promise from you that he may never see you again, for he believes that to meet the same traveler twice is a foretelling of terrible potency. You smile at him as you sling the bag into Hermes' basket, and you tell him he didn't need to beg. You'd have kept that promise anyway.

(You keep both promises. The next time you pass through that city, Kaiman is dead, and though you tell many stories to people both deserving and otherwise of hearing what you've learned in your travels, you never tell the same stories twice. This is something you learned from the stranger in the dirty trenchcoat, the first traveler you ever met: every story is the property of its audience, and theirs to retell again. Only they can decide if it continues. You aren't the stories you tell, any more than you are a loaded gun.)

Underneath the binding your chest feels tight and hot; the collar of your jacket, despite the layers of clothing you routinely wear to disguise your shape, feels cool against your neck. It's another discomfort you'll have to adjust to, and you know you'll outgrow it in a year anyway.

But those budding lumps beneath your collarbone aren't there when you press your hand to your chest.

Slot enough pieces together and the shape in your hands starts to look like the thing it's supposed to be someday. Eventually it becomes second nature.

"Kino," you say, laughing, "my name is Kino."

"Of course you are," Hermes says, in tones of pained bafflement. "Who else would you be?"

You smile and pat his gas tank quickly to avoid burning your fingertips. "No one, Hermes. No one."

"I don't understand the need to restate something so obvious," Hermes mutters.

You have to laugh. So you do - the binding's tightness on your chest presses down and it comes out a little rougher, a little lower than you expected - and the lower pitch of it resettles you in your skin a little more.


End file.
